From Every Angle, a Rising Revolution

"HOW this load of centuries wants to knock me down," wrote the Puerto Rican-born poet Julia de Burgos. Seeing her candid, youthful-looking face in a 1940's photograph of Latino writers in New York, you would not think that history -- her own -- would lead to her death on the streets of Manhattan a few years later, in her late 30's.

A small framed photograph of her, a studio head shot, sits on a table in the lobby of the Julia de Burgos Cultural Center at Lexington Avenue and 106th Street in East Harlem -- Spanish Harlem, El Barrio -- where she lived. And hers is just one portrait in a neighborhood full of them: pop stars on posters in Mexican and Puerto Rican music shops; political heroes on murals; blank-faced saints, known by the symbols they carry, in churches and botánicas.

There's yet another kind of portrait over on Fifth Avenue at the Museum of the City of New York: a historical snapshot of El Barrio itself, as seen through pictures taken at a revolutionary moment in the 1960's. And, next door, El Museo del Barrio is following up its recent survey of Latin American portraiture with a photo-documentary likeness of a single time and place, Mexico in the early 20th century.

"Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond, Photographs by Casasola 1900-1940" is in every way extraordinary. It has the span of a Greek epic, and the nested themes and subplots of a picaresque novel. The protagonists, alternately visionary and delusional, often dangerous, are Olympian in scale. Its bit parts are vividly drawn. Its chorus -- a curtain of faces, a sea of heads, a blur of bodies -- says much by saying almost nothing, by simply being there through everything, something surging into action, mostly observing and absorbing.

As complex stories often are, this one is the product of many hands, the first belonging to Agustin Victor Casasola. Born in Mexico City in 1874, he began his career as a typographer, then turned to reporting, and around 1900 began to take pictures. Photography was coming into its own as a news medium. It was big, and he decided to make it his business.

Enlisting the help of his gifted younger brother, Miguel, and other professionals, he set up a photo agency that, over four decades, generated hundreds of thousands of pictures. Agustin Casasola put his own name on most of them, whether he had taken them or not. We don't know his reason for doing so. Was it professional egotism, or a practical effort to consolidate a brand name? We do know that he understood the value of photography as a form of history, which led him to preserve nearly every image handled by the firm.

Some 500,000 prints and negatives survive as the Casasola Archive in the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico. The 92 recently reprinted pictures in the show here, organized by the photographer Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, are culled from it.

History, in its turn, gave Casasola a grand subject: an era of hair-raising political and social upheaval that had photographers dashing from presidential festivities, to firing squads, to guerrilla camps, to night courts and jazz cafes. Mexican culture, already an explosive hybrid, was in acute transition. A capitalist economy was making the rich impossibly rich, the poor starvingly poor. A nation that had joined the larger world was simultaneously looking back to what it fantasized it once had been.

The exhibition touches on all of this. Among the earliest pictures is a 1910 photograph of Gen. Porfirio Díaz, president of the country for more than 30 years. He introduced technology, encouraged international trade and enforced a civic peace. He also stripped peasants of land and basically made them slaves to foreign investors.

By 1910, popular anger was volcanic. Charismatic figures like Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa, known as Pancho Villa, amassed provincial armies so huge and vengeful that the government could not resist them. Díaz fled to France in 1911; Casasola photographed his ship pulling out. A new president, Francisco I. Madero, took power but was a washout. He was killed, someone else took over, and a pattern was set: revolution was literally that, a revolving wheel of disruption that carried some forward, crushed others.

Sometimes you can see its machinery spinning between rather than within pictures. In a photograph from around 1910, little girls in starched white aprons sit obediently in a classroom; Díaz was still in power. Five years later, a young woman -- she might have been one of the girls, now older -- stares with sidelong mistrust at the camera. She is dressed in soldier's pants, combat boots and a farmer's hat. De Burgos would have liked her. "I delight in the desire to be Don Juan, or a bandit, or an anarchist worker, or a great soldier," she wrote in the 1930's or 40's.

But every now and then, the latent cruelty of idealism looks straight at you. In 1915, the 30-something Zapata, with his marvelous moustache and ember eyes, sat for a Casasola portrait. He was that baffling thing, a right-thinking executioner, scrupulous and pitiless. Four years later, the same face is grotesquely bloated, the eyes sealed shut, as a group of young men prop up the fallen hero for a post-mortem photo-op. Are they his supporters? His assassins? Or are they the chorus, neither good guys nor bad guys, always there, like the Fates.

Casasola and his crew were certainly very there, all the time, shooting whatever, wherever, with the opportunistic randomness that defines photojournalism. Sometimes the subject was epochal, often it was ordinary. And, in fact, images of ordinary life, passing in parade across the gallery walls, make up most of the show.

The players? Shoe factory workers and street clowns. Politicians and prostitutes. Vamps and martyrs. Shawl-shrouded women and soldiers in khaki. Murderers under arrest; dissected cadavers under the knife. Blind orchestras and amateur wrestlers. Men in dresses, men in sombreros. Rich landowners -- hacendados -- and children loaded down like pack mules. The images are alternately awful and absurd, and sometimes it's hard to say which.

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Occasionally we bump into someone we know, like Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo in a portrait by Rivera. This picture is actually part of a second, smaller show called "Points of View," of photographs recently acquired by El Museo, including six pieces by Felipe (Phil) Dante (1934-2004), a founder of the photography collective En Foco. (More En Foco pictures are on view at Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos Community College in the Bronx.)

Mostly contemporary, "Points of View" is well worth spending time with, not only because so much of it is so good, but because it demonstrates the steadily expanding range of an institution that began as a Nuyorican museum more than 30 years ago, and now represents "Latino" in its myriad forms.

It is the earlier museum, though, that we find in "El Barrio: Puerto Rican New York" at the Museum of the City of New York, an exhibition organized by Kathleen Benson, curator of community projects, in conjunction with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, that is a portrait within a portrait.

The larger likeness is a detailed but expansive sketch, assembled from archival images and documents, of the Puerto Rican presence in East Harlem from the turn of the 20th century. The group photo of Latino writers, with de Burgos smiling but unrelaxed in the front row, is here.

The second, interior portrait is made up of some three dozen photographs taken in and around East Harlem in the late 1960's and 1970's by Hiram S. Maristany, who was born in El Barrio and still lives there. A few pictures -- of a sidewalk altar; of children watching a street festival from a fire escape -- serve as scene setters. But the others, on-the-spot records of political activism, have a concentrated heat. They're the photographic version of a flaming heart.

In the summer of 1969, a group of Puerto Rican students, Mr. Maristany among them, formed the Young Lords Party, using the Black Panthers as a model. Revolutionary in ideology, but focused on community action, they organized a garbage campaign to clean the streets and occupied a hospital, demanding health care for the poor. Mr. Maristany, the Lords' official photographer, was there every step of the way. He was also at El Museo del Barrio when it was new -- he served as director from 1977 to 1979 -- and at El Taller Boricua, or the Puerto Rican Workshop, now in the Julia de Burgos Cultural Center.

De Burgos's spirit is built into the show. The wave-shaped blue panels designed for the installation by the architect Warren A. James were inspired by an image from her poems. And one can easily imagine her words -- extravagantly romantic, politically exhortatory -- in the East Harlem air in that heady time.

It didn't last long. The Young Lords, riven by internal conflicts, disbanded. And de Burgos herself was, of course, long gone. She died of alcoholism and exposure on an East Harlem sidewalk. Because she was found without identification, she was buried in a potter's field. Only later was her body sent to Puerto Rico.

But if she lost a battle with herself, she won the war with time and history. They did not knock her down; they lifted her up, out of old photographs and into the minds of young poets and thinkers looking for ways to say the complicated things they want to say, today.

I am embodied in now; about yesterday I know nothing.

In the alive, my life knows the I Am of the new.

The words come from one of her poems, translated by the writer Jack Agueros, an East Harlem native. And the poem comes from one of her books. It is a turbulent self-portrait of a book, as exhilarating and puzzling in its intimate way as the Casasola and Maristany photographs of revolution. And it is titled, with a poet's exquisite irony, "Song of the Simple Truth."